How Federal Agencies are Meeting the Email Authentication Challenge
On October 16, 2017 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it would require federal agencies to implement email authentication (including DMARC) on their email-sending domains by January 15, 2018. The DHS directive, BOD 18-01, also required agencies to set their DMARC records to a policy of enforcement, which provides protection against email […]
Email fraud landscape, Winter 2020
The battle against phishing rages on. Estimates from the FBI peg losses due to just one type of email-based attack, the business email compromise (BEC), at $1.7 billion in 2019 alone. Other sources have noted that 83% of email attacks are brand impersonations and another 6% are impersonations of people, meaning nearly 90% of all […]
Email fraud landscape, Summer 2020
Valimail has been tracking the usage of Domain-based Message Authentication, Receiving, and Conformance (DMARC) across tens of millions of domains since early 2017. During that time, we’ve seen consistent growth in DMARC usage and its overall effectiveness. Now, for the first time, the number of domains with DMARC records exceeds one million. Key findings:
Email Fraud Landscape Spring 2021
Email continues to be one of the most effective ways to communicate. This accounts for its growth during a year of global pandemic, but also for the fact that hackers continue to use email as a primary attack vector. To get a read on the rate of domain spoofing among email traffic as a whole, […]
Top retailers remain vulnerable to email brand spoofing
Retailers in 2020 are leaning heavily on e-commerce, thanks to the pandemic, and during the holiday season that means they are redoubling their email efforts. There is a problem, however: Most retailers have not devoted the same level of effort to securing email as they have to optimizing its effectiveness. The result, in one crucial […]
Election email security
Valimail’s analysis shows that, at virtually every level of the American election infrastructure, there is massive vulnerability to impersonation. This is due largely to the poor penetration of email authentication standards that can prevent spoofing. Not only local governments, but also state governments, campaign and PAC domains, and election systems manufacturers are, by and large, […]
Email impersonation attacks: The unseen brand threat, Ponemon Institute Research
Marketers are charged with protecting and maintaining their companies’ brand, goodwill, and customer loyalty. However, this is becoming more of a challenge because of the risk of email impersonation attacks leading to an erosion of brand trust. Also worrying: data breaches caused by phishing or spoofing that can compromise marketers’ efforts in reaching prospective and […]
Real vs. fake email test results
Approximately six weeks prior to the 2018 midterm elections in the United States, Valimail conducted a survey to test adult Americans’ ability to distinguish fraudulent campaign emails from authentic ones. Out of 1,079 respondents, the average number of correct responses was 4.98 out of 11, or slightly under 50 percent. The survey results indicate that […]
